Rufus is a small utility that helps format and create bootable USB flash drives, such as USB keys/pendrives, memory sticks, etc. Despite its small size, Rufus provides everything you need! Oh, and Rufus is fast. For instance it"s about twice as fast as UNetbootin, Universal USB Installer or Windows 7 USB download tool, on the creation of a Windows 7 USB installation drive from an ISO (with honorable mention to WiNToBootic for managing to keep up). It is also marginally faster on the creation of Linux bootable USBs from ISOs. A non-exhaustive list of Rufus supported ISOs is available here.
It can be especially useful for cases where:
- you need to create USB installation media from bootable ISOs (Windows, Linux, UEFI, etc.)
- you need to work on a system that doesn"t have an OS installed
- you need to flash a BIOS or other firmware from DOS
- you want to run a low-level utility
Rufus 3.20 Beta changelog:
- Enable applicable Windows User Experience options for Windows 10
- Make Windows User Experience options persist between sessions
- Add automatic local account creation and regional options duplication
- (NB: This is limited to creating an account with the same name as the current user and with an empty password that the user will be prompted to change after first reboot)
- Add a workaround for ISOs that have a syslinux symbolic link to /isolinux/ (Knoppix)
- Revert to offline insertion of registry keys for the TPM/SB/RAM bypass where possible (#1971)
- Remove storage bypass, since this is a bogus bypass that doesn"t do anything (#1990)
- Improve BIOS compatibility when displaying the "UEFI boot only" alert message
- Fix Windows User Experience dialog appearing twice for Windows To Go (#1968)
- Fix Windows User Experience options not being applied for ARM64 (#1996)
- Fix Microsoft Account bypass not being applied unless TPM/SB/RAM bypass is selected (#1981)
Download: Rufus 3.20 Beta | 1.33 MB (Open Source)
Link: Rufus Home Page | Project Page @GitHub